Upgraded to Serious

Heather McHugh’s thirteenth book, Upgraded to Serious, is a fast-paced, funny, verbally dexterous collection that’s “boiling up and boiling over” as it accesses varieties of loss. Her unexpected rhymes and rhythms encourage infectious laughter as both palliative and prophylactic, in the face of human sufferings and of ignorance. Alert to changes in physiological and technological life, McHugh records the patient’s pulse: Being “upgraded to serious” from a critical condition is a diagnosis. McHugh’s ironies rest on the knowledge that even poems cannot “save the world / without exception.”